Printing systems comprise a variety of embodiments, and typically include one or more printers for receiving and printing incoming jobs by use of a marking engine. In addition to the printers themselves, the printing system may include print servers, clients, hosts, and other specialized printing applications implemented on computer systems. These additional components may facilitate the generation and transfer of print jobs within the printing system. For example, in one printing system, multiple client applications may each submit print jobs to a print server. The print server may then sort, pre-process, and transmit these received jobs to one or more of the printers for printing.
In printing systems, the overall printing speed is typically bottlenecked by the speed of rasterization that takes place at a print controller. The rasterized version of the print job, generated by the RIP, may require significant processing resources to generate, and may be orders of magnitude larger in size than the original print job. This rasterized job may then be sent to a marking engine for printing. In continuous-form printing systems, it may be particularly important for rasterized data to be generated and provided to a marking engine at a high rate of speed, because if the rasterized data is not provided quickly enough, it may be necessary to halt the continuous-form printing process. Because the media traveling through the printing system moves at a high rate of speed, any sudden halts in printing place physical strain on the printing medium, thereby increasing the potential for ripping the printed media.
When multiple copies of a print job are requested, printing systems often attempt to increase printing speed by utilizing a print spool. In such systems, the RIP rasterizes the entire first copy of the print job and stores it at the spool. Thus, when printing initiates for the additional copies of the print job, the marking engine may simply use the already-rasterized data from the print spool. This saves processing time at the RIP, which is thought to be beneficial because the RIP itself may bottleneck the overall speed of the printing system. However, users of printing systems continue to desire systems and methods that increase the speed at which rasterized print data is provided to marking engines.